| Abstrakt: |
In Horace Smith's nearly forgotten companion to Percy Shelley's most famous sonnet, the broken sculpture voices its decree: "'I am great Ozymandias,' saith the stone." Shelley's poem, on the other hand, takes care to give us the king's speech in writing: "on the pedestal, these words appear." Shelley's instinct for the difference between inscription and saying speaks to his own belief in poetry's staying power. Two hundred years on, what remains of Shelley's poetry besides words on a page? The extent to which words, and the pages on which they appear, mattered to Shelley constitutes the broad subject of this essay, which also permits itself to dwell in a few unanswerable questions about where poetry resides—the throat, the letter, or somewhere else entirely. Interrogating "Ozymandias" for its enthusiasm as well as its skepticism regarding print, the essay wishes to raise the following question: how does Shelley's attitude towards poetry's remains—its "everlasting" power—prefigure our own contemporary debates regarding the permanence and impermanence of poetic texts in a digital age? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
